If imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery, William Forsythe approached
canonization at Jacob’s Pillow last week. In Aspen Santa Fe
Ballet’s program of four dances, one was by Forsythe—the master
of distorted hyper-ballet—while two, by Helen Pickett and
Jorma Elo, worked strongly in Forsythe’s tradition. A fourth,
by Itzik Galili, drew from a European mode broadly engineered
by Forsythe and a few others.

Born
in New York City, Forsythe left America more than 30 years
ago to perform in Germany. After adopting Frankfurt as a base
in 1984, he’s never really looked back. It’s hard to sum up
his early contributions to contemporary dance. Think of taking
apart a house and putting it back together so that the roof
is on one side, the walls are piled up on the front lawn,
and the floor, now made of glass, is glowing. It’s still a
house, kind of. Forsythe’s early work revolves around classical
ballet. But where ballet is predictable, right-angled and
warm, Forsythe presents ambiguity, hyperextension and tempered
rage. Forsythe’s genius was to do Balanchine one better, extrapolating
points in cubic space to their unlikeliest end, creating freakishly
attenuated lines that warp around each other. By setting harsh
lights and evil-sounding music against his dancers’ carved-out
shapes, he also pioneered a new stage aesthetic. If you’ve
ever wondered why so many contemporary dances are spot-lit
entirely from above, he’s your answer.

For all
the upsides to imitating Forsythe, there are just as many
downfalls. But in programming terms, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
created a net positive. Just when the program turned a mite
pretty—in Pickett’s opener Petal—it changed to dark
humor, with Galili’s grotesque Chameleon. Though several
works grew monotone, they found breathtaking final images.

About
that monotone quality, which may be the major flaw of this
style: heaps of abstraction and a dearth of context will soon
drive an audience to frustration. (Though Elo’s abstraction
was so unusual that it created its own context.) As with artists
like Duchamp and Banksy, frustration may be the goal, to break
us down and force our reconsideration of long-held criteria
for beauty. In the sublime opening of Slingerland,
Gavin Bryars’ sharp violin drones on while the partners, Katherine
Eberle and Sam Chittenden, manipulate their limbs in a taut,
even rhythm. Ten minutes later, the same drone, same rhythm.
Suddenly, the violin breathes to a close and the low lights
flicker and blink off, while Eberle, held on point by Chittenden,
lets her balance wander elliptically away. Most notable about
Slingerland: It’s not alienatingly anti-classical.
In fact, things are fairly old-school. You’re focused on the
woman, and how beautiful she is. Fine details cement success,
including Eberle’s stiff yellow tutu and her spastic little
feet in lift sequences. She especially nails the ineffable
“melting through” positions, a trademark of Forsythe’s work
that’s hard for novices to grasp.

Just
ask the insecure-looking dancers for Petal, who totally
missed Chittenden and Eberle’s tensile, down-low feel. Choreographer
Pickett, a former dancer with Forsythe’s defunct Frankfurt
Ballet, united a load of ideas here, but the dancers were
so tentative (or emphatically corny) that the choreography
didn’t register as complete. Pickett smartly merged selections
by Philip Glass with similar music by Thomas Montgomery Newman,
and the quirky results kept you guessing at the piece’s path,
right up to its pulse-quickening conclusion. The Pillow’s
erratic program credits don’t list who created the set, but
it’s Petal’s finest feature. Forming a luminous, open
cube are three enormous white sheets, which, a la James Turrell,
assume Todd Elmer’s lighting in Easter-egg yellow and pink.

Quasi-Turrell
appeared in 1st Flash, by Finland’s Jorma Elo, the
resident choreographer at Boston Ballet. As the title suggests,
Elo’s work opened in darkness but for a polygonal plane of
harsh white light (designed by Jordan Tuinman) 15 feet above
the stage. For a few minutes, it looked like a projection,
but as the stage lights came up, the illusion was lost to
a solid light-box suspended from clumsily tied cables. No
matter, the dancers’ arrived for a new kind of thrill, squiggling
their bodies and hurtling through the futuristic tricks that
characterize Elo’s post-Forsythe choreography. Where Forsythe
deals in cubes, Elo works almost solely in planes, folding
and intersecting levels, always finding new negative space
to exploit.

Itzik
Galili, an Israeli, showed Chameleon, which felt at
first like the odd one out. Five women, seated in a line of
green chairs, pulled their faces in and out of ugliness. As
individual details diverged, psychosis set in. They tickled
themselves and counted their fingers, which folded inward
to blow out their brains. Stylish stagecraft linked Chameleon
to its companions, as did its dancers’ indelible beauty, no
matter their furious grimaces and contortions.